Cover girl: The difficulty of illustrating 'Lolita' persists, 60 years on
By Siobhan Lyons, The Conversation
Updated 1207 GMT (1907 HKT) October 23, 2015
Siobhan Lyons is a tutor in Media and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer. CNN is showcasing the work of The Conversation, a collaboration between journalists and academics to provide news analysis and commentary. The content is produced solely by The Conversation.
(CNN)When it was published in 1955 by Olympia Press,Vladimir Nabokov's seminal and controversial novel Lolitahad a very simple, green cover design. Nabokov himself had wanted his own particular cover: "I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls."
Some 60 years later -- and still frequently topping best-book lists -- Lolita has inspired hundreds of front cover designs, many of which feature similar visual tropes: endless lollipops, lips, lipstick, scrunchies, underwear, bathers, heart-shaped sunglasses from Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation, sly references to the female anatomy (strawberries, etc.), and a lot of pink.
In her work The Lolita Phenomenon (2003), academic Barbra Churchill, from the University of Alberta, wrote: "the Lolita image has so pervaded popular consciousness that even those who have never read the book usually know what it means to call a girl 'Lolita'. The moniker 'Lolita,' translated into the language of popular culture, means a sexy little number, a sassy ingénue, a bewitching adolescent siren."
While many of the double-entendre images of the female anatomy partly suit Nabokov's mischievous writing style and his playful treatment of the subject matter, many of these covers take this liberty a bit too far.
They convey the (false) impression of Lolita as a young seductress, when in fact the character was sexually abused by her step-father, the infamous Humbert Humbert, and robbed of her youth.
The discrepancy between the cover designs and the themes of the novel are stark. In 2013, The New Yorker'sRachel Arons explained that "the sexualised vision of Lolita perpetuated by popular culture has very little to do with the text of Nabokov's novel, in which Lolita is not a teen-aged seductress but a sexually abused twelve-year-old girl."
Rachel Arons, The New Yorker
Many of those covers are featured in John Bertram and Yuri Leving's book Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl, Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design (2013), in which they argue: "If there ever were a book whose covers have so reliably gotten it wrong, it is Lolita."…Although we have been taught to disregard a book's cover, media studies academic Nicole Matthews argues just the opposite in her work Judging a Book by its Cover (2007)
The Lolita image has so pervaded popular consciousness that even those who have never read the book usually know what it means to call a girl 'Lolita'
Barbra Churchill, University of Alberta
ideal cover was or has ever been created, and many contemporary cover designs certainly would have baffled Nabokov.
The original green hardback design is hardly alluring or meaningful in any way, and perhaps that is apt for a novel whose protagonist is the unreliable narrator par excellence, and whose subject matter is told with an eclectic mix of black humor and melancholy reflections. Since the novel itself resists any sound interpretation, a blank cover -- even now, 60 years on -- might be the way to go.
As Nabokov wrote in a letter to publisher Walter J Minton in 1958 from Ithaca, New York:
"If we cannot find that kind of artistic and virile painting, let us settle for an immaculate white jacket (rough texture paper instead of the usual glossy kind), with LOLITA in bold black lettering."
Copyright 2015 The Conversation. Some rights reserved.